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DIY Paper Marbling with Pup Tart Handmade

Happy Sunday all! As it’s #SundayBlogShare day, I thought I’d tell you about a fun DIY paper marbling workshop I went to this week hosted by Pup Tart Handmade at Drink, Shop & Do (my favourite craft café near King’s Cross in London) – you might have seen it in my February event round-up!

This was Hannah’s first ever marbling workshop, but she was such a pro, you would never know, and we had so much fun. Marbling is actually really simple, and very therapeutic – I recommend it!

All you need to marble is:

Some plain paper, card or fabric that you want to ‘marble’ – you can even use gift tags!

A tray with deep sides (like a paint tray), or a foil roasting tin

A selection of marbling paint or inks in different colours (available from craft stores)

Bucket of cold water and a jug, or even better, a bath and a shower head

A size such as methocel (a very thin wall paper paste – the paint floats on top of this)

Skewers, toothpicks or forks (whatever is available) to make patterns

Newspaper (to save you ‘goo’ing everywhere)

Marbling involves transferring floating paint or ink from a ‘size’ to a material, creating a marbled effect. Hannah had pre-prepped our ‘size’ (thin wallpaper paste), so all we had to do was pick our coloured paints and one-by-one drip them into the tray, using skewers or forks to make patterns.

Once we were happy with the colours and pattern, we simply laid our piece of card, paper of fabric on top of the goo, starting at one corner and lowering towards the other to avoid air bubbles, and left it on the surface of the goo for a short while, allowing the paint to transfer to the paper.

You can usually see the pattern come through on the other side so you know the ink has transferred correctly. After a few minutes, you can then lift the paper off of the goo, let it drip if necessary, and then wash the goo off with a jug of water or shower head (depending on your set up!)

It seems counter-intuitive to put paper in water, but as long as it’s thick enough it’ll be absolutely fine, and it won’t disintegrate, as long as you don’t soak it for an age. Once your goo has washed off, either lay the paper flat on newspaper to dry, or hang it from a drying rack, like so:

You can leave your paper to dry naturally in a warm room, or to speed things up, use a hairdryer. We tried that at the workshop, but unfortunately dropped the hairdyrer in the goo (whoops), so reverted to traditional methods (waiting…), and Hannah kindly posted us our finished pieces.

Hannah hosted a competition on Instagram during the event where we were encouraged to tag our marbled makes with #PupTartParty. I was thrilled to learn the following day that I had won, and Hannah sent me an amazing package of Pup Tart products, which you can see below.

If you check out her Etsy store, you can buy these pieces yourself. The rainbow purse zip pouch is £10, and the green glitter party clutch purse is £15. I love them! There was also a cute marbled business card holder, and a marbled notebook for my crafty ‘to do’ lists! A-mazing. Thanks Hannah!

All in all, I had a fantastic time. If this looks fun to you, I urge you to look at the Drink, Shop & Do ‘what’s on’ calendar for future events, and keep an eye out for future Pup Tart workshops – hopefully many more to come! If you pop in to the café, you can find some of Hannah’s wares on sale too.

Have you tried marbling before? Apparently it can also be done with shaving cream?